Wordle for artwork buffs is extra common than you’d suppose

That’s because it’s not just one person’s passion project shared on Reddit, but an official game you can play on the website for Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art.

It launched earlier last month and it plays more similarly to Framed than Wordle, where you need to guess the name of a movie based on six different screenshots.

Artle, unsurprisingly, is about using paintings to guess the name of an artist. Conceptually, it’s much harder than Framed since it requires detailed knowledge of the art world.

Plus, you only have four attempts, with every wrong answer presenting you with a different painting by the same artist. Whether you get it right or wrong, the game then tells you the names of each painting and links to their pages on the website, so you can learn about their history.

Despite its more niche subject matter, it’s apparently proved to be popular. The gallery claims to have seen an increase in web traffic of 40% since the game launched, with hundreds of thousands of players from across the world giving it a go.

A quarter of those players have gone on to explore other parts of the website, including the event pages.

‘Our intention was to create an experience that would encourage audiences to learn about art in a fun, unique way,’ senior product manager Steven Garbarino told Artnet.

‘One of the National Gallery’s values is curiosity and continuous learning. What better way to foster curiosity than a guessing game!’

He added that the hardest part of designing it was ensuring it wasn’t too difficult, but it sounds like Artle’s players prefer a challenge.

‘Artle players have told us they have visited the National Gallery after discovering a new artist, and educators have shared that they use our game as a way to interact with students or give as an extra credit assignment,’ said Garbarino.

‘We’ve also found that players aren’t discouraged by a challenge – they are twice as likely to click through to learn more about an artist when they don’t know the answer.’

If you’re interested in giving it a go, Artle can be played here. New puzzles are added daily and, just like Wordle, it tracks your stats, and you can share your results on social media.